Brand entity matching

When an AI engine writes about your brand, it doesn't always use the exact name you registered in GeoBubbles. It might use a nickname, drop the legal suffix, link your domain instead of writing the name, or use a country-specific variant.

Entity matching is the layer that decides: "Is this mention actually about your brand?" — and it directly determines whether a mention counts toward your VS, SOV, and TMR.

---

What counts as a match

We match against three signals, in order of confidence:

1. Brand name and aliases — the canonical name you set in Settings, plus any aliases you add. Case-insensitive, diacritic-insensitive, and tolerant of common punctuation.
2. Domain matches — your primary domain and any sibling domains, with TLD-stripped fallback (so acme.com and acme.de are treated as the same brand for matching, even though they're tracked separately).
3. Citation links — when a surface returns a source list (AI Overviews, AI Mode), we match the cited URL against your domain.

A mention is counted if any of these three triggers. Citations are weighted separately — see Citations vs mentions.

---

Why you might be missing mentions

If you see an AI answer in the wild that obviously refers to your brand but it isn't reflected in your scores, the usual causes are:

• No alias for a common variant — e.g. "GeoBubbles" is set but the AI wrote "Geo Bubbles" (with a space) and you don't have that alias.
• Sub-brand or product name — the AI mentioned your product name instead of the company name, and the product isn't in your alias list.
• Different domain in citation — the AI cited a blog post on acme-blog.com but your tracked domain is acme.com.
• Third-party paraphrase — the AI summarised what someone said about you without naming you directly. Nothing we can match against.

You can add aliases anytime in Settings → Sites → [your site] → Brand & aliases. New aliases apply to future measurement cycles.

---

Competitor matching

The same logic applies to competitors you've added. We extract every brand-like entity from each AI answer, match it against your competitor list, and use what's left over as "other / unknown brands" — these surface in the Suggested competitors panel so you can decide whether to add them.